litcritter bashing and the academic factory

Mr P.A. Van Heusden pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk
Wed Oct 27 04:04:09 PDT 1999


On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Steve Perry wrote:


>
> that's a very provocative set of quotations you've
> marshalled, angela, but can't the point of it all be
> put more simply? i.e., the academy always shills for
> state power (and the "natural" pre-eminence of the ruling
> orders)?

This seems particularly clear in the 'natural sciences' (except that I'd replace 'state' with some other phrase - ruling class, maybe - in that, through foundations, industry funding, etc. alternative channels of ruling class incorporation appear) where an empiricist focus on 'real' results easily dove-tails into a focus on 'useful' (for capital) results.

In 'Psychology and Society' (ed. Ian Parker, Russell Spears) one of the essays (I think the one by Stephen Reicher) talks about specific instances of how funding pressures enforced the 'Faustian contract' that radicals in academia are forced to sign with the administrators of the academy. He also talks about resisting that contract - on that topic, if there are any people in the sciences on this list who are interested in forming a radical scientists network (ala Science for the People), drop me an email.


>
> and that's true whether it's a matter of prescriptive
> sociology or the more contemporary pomo "radicalism,"
> which serves mainly to create/reinforce a sense of
> powerlessness.
>

While I don't disagree with you, I think it is necessary to dig a bit under the surface of the phenomenon to document how it works. I know in Computer Science, 'star' intellectuals like Nicholas Negroponte (from the MIT Media Lab) define the intellectual horizons of many 'technology workers' by their techno-utopian announcements. How this works in the 'humanities' is less clear to me - who funds Baudrillard, for instance? Who validates his results to ensure that he receives further funding?

On the other side of the scale - who funds Eagleton, or Spivak? What are the constraints on their actions?

Knowing how the beast moves is useful to know where to hit it first.

Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx

NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.



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